As we previously noted, and as this sales chart shows, and The B&N chart from last night confirmed, Jeffrey Brown’s DARTH VADER AND SON is doing very well, especially in advance of Father’s Day this Sunday. The Tribune interviews Brown with a classic cartoonist profile description:
A few days a week, Jeffrey Brown is here, wearing a plaid work shirt, his mussed brown hair and chocolate beard flecked with gray and blond, looking like an artisan bread baker or hipster lumberjack. He’s found at that small table at the back of Beans & Bagels, tucked into a side street in Lincoln Square. Moms with rolled yoga mats file past the window, Brown Line trains roll by. If you notice him at all, he cuts a modest figure. He’ll be drawing in a sketchbook, the table crowded by a laptop, stacks of notebooks and pens arranged single file; on the off-chance a family needs a large table on a Tuesday morning, Brown sits at the small table, cramped, his back to the room, hunched forward, posture lousy.
But it sneaks in a bit of news as well:
The book, and Brown’s thoughtful touch with pop satire, is already enough of a hit that Chronicle is asking for a sequel (featuring Darth and a 16-year old Princess Leia) and Scholastic commissioned “Jedi Academy,” which — from the look of early doodles in Brown’s sketchbooks — is a “Lil’ Star Wars.” (It also can’t hurt that George Lucas himself, having OK’d the books, asked Chronicle to send him a few extra copies of “Vader and Son.”)
Jeffrey Brown, LucasFilms licensee. As long as he gets to work on some of his more personal comics along the way, we’re perfectly fine with him making money making comics.
The profile also includes something that we didn’t know about Brown:
Brown’s wife, Jennifer Bell, a former Marvel Comics business development executive whom Brown met at the Wizard World comics convention in Rosemont, sounds relieved that her husband is moving on.
See, indie people? Maybe some good can come out of going to Wizard World? OTOH, lightning doesn’t strike twice. YMMV.
This book is a delight. It deserves all its success and more.